Thirty something – why the voice of Lisa Simpson thinks the iconic animation is only getting started

The woman who brought Lisa Simpson to life – Yeardley Smith – took years to come to terms with her anonymous success. Now the actor celebrates 30 years of The Simpsons.

When Yeardley Smith scored a strange little voiceover job more than three decades ago, neither she – nor anyone else – had any expectations it would last.

For five years, the diminutive American actress with a very distinctive voice had been carving out a tidy career in TV, film and theatre and figured this gig voicing a nine-year-old called Lisa Simpson for a series of animated shorts on The Tracy Ullman show was a fun and interesting detour, at best.

The way Smith tells it, she and her cast mates Dan Castellaneta (who voices Homer), Julie Kavner (as Marge) and Nancy Cartwright (her bratty brother Bart) would record late in the afternoon in a “sh —y, makeshift, studio behind the audience,” while creator Matt Groening would “come flying in 20 minutes late with the script.”

“None of those things made you think ‘oh yeah – this is going to last, we’re good, this has legs’,” Smith tells News Corp Australia wryly.

America’s favourite TV family … The Simpsons have set the gold standard for prime-time comedy Picture: Supplied/Fox

But the shorts about the dysfunctional family were well received enough to demand their own show on the fledgling Fox Network – and 30 years ago on Tuesday, the first episode of The Simpsons went to air.

Despite the naysayers, who said an animated comedy in prime time couldn’t possibly work – it hadn’t been done since The Flintstones – the four-fingered family from fictional Springfield went gangbusters – wooing worldwide audiences and critics alike and kicking off a merchandising empire and genuine pop culture phenomenon.

Thirty one seasons, 671 episodes, 34 Primetime Emmys and a feature film later and Smith makes the shock prediction: “we are probably about half way done”.

“It’s a show with great courage and we respect your intelligence and will never talk down to you. I think audiences really appreciate that. Usually the model of a sitcom is ‘just a little bit dumber, because we want to get a wider audience’. Our show is like ‘screw that, you’ll catch up.”

Story time … a scene from season 30 of The Simpsons, as Homer reads To Kill A Mockingbird to daughter Lisa. Picture: Supplied/Fox

And after all these years, Smith says she still loves playing Lisa – the studious, endlessly optimistic, saxophone-playing, philosophy-spouting, vegetarian who is the brains and so often the conscience of The Simpsons.

“I still say that Lisa Simpson is who I want to be when I grow up,” the 55-year-old Smith says, with a laugh.

“There is a lot of Lisa Simpson in me and a lot of me in Lisa Simpson but I feel like Lisa Simpson is the absolute best version of me.

“I am so gratified by people who come up to me and say ‘Lisa Simpson got me through a hard time’ or ‘she inspired me to play the saxophone’ or ‘she made me want to do science’ or ‘she made it OK to be nerdy and bookish’. Whatever it is, whatever their takeaway from that little character was that empowered them is icing on icing – it just brings tears to your eyes.”

Dear as Lisa is to Smith’s heart, she admits it took her a while to embrace the success of The Simpsons, concerned it would overshadow what she thought was her real career.

Backwaters and crapholes … on holidays with The Simpsons, (L-R) Homer, Maggie, Lisa, Marge and Bart. Picture: Supplied/Fox

“Teased mercilessly” as a child for her voice, she’d never thought about voiceover work but the runaway success of The Simpsons come at the same time more conventional acting opportunities were drying up for her.

Such was her ambivalence, she hid the Emmy she won in 1992 for Outstanding Voiceover Performance in a cupboard for 9 years.

“It’s an incredible irony that I will be remembered through the ages for this funny, high, nasally voice that I have as an eight-year-old,” she says, laughing.

“It wasn’t that I resented The Simpsons so much, it was that I didn’t understand what the shift was. I never took my eye off the ball, I never went on walkabout and said ‘I’ll be back – wait for me’, so it really was incredibly scary and it was frustrating and I didn’t know how to deal with it.”

It wasn’t until about 15 years ago, well over a decade of global success, during a read with her cast mates that she had the epiphany that she was only making herself miserable by pining for the acting career she’d always envisaged rather than embracing the gift she’d been so unexpectedly given.

From Russia With Love … in an upcoming episode, Bart and his friends prank barkeep, Moe by ordering him a Russian bride from the dark web. Picture: Supplied/Fox

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“I made a promise to myself that after that I would change my attitude,” she says. “And once I did, I thought ‘you have a tremendous opportunity to make so much more out of this huge windfall that you have landed – you play a character that you deeply love’.

“It was really sort of an a-ha moment and a massive revelation. I don’t think it was that I was ungrateful, it was more that I was waiting for something else and then when I realised ‘there isn’t anything else, Yeardley – it’s all right here’.”

The Simpsons has attracted an astonishing array of guests over its 30 years – from Oscar-winners to pop superstars, esoteric authors and revered scientists.

It’s also eerily predicted the future on many occasions including a startlingly accurate Lady Gaga flying in to perform at the Super Bowl in 2012, five years before she did it in real life; and predicting a Donald Trump presidency way back in 2000.

Smith thinks maybe Gaga, who had guested on the show, was a case of life imitating art, but she admits the Trump thing has her beat.

“I am pretty damn sure he is not a fan of our show so how those two things matched up, that really makes you feel like this has to be some sort of quantum physics where we are all connected and there’s a collective consciousness. I don’t know.”

* The Simpsons 30th Anniversary Marathon begins Monday December 16 on Fox 8.

Originally published as Thirty something – why the voice of Lisa Simpson thinks the iconic animation is only getting started